** Or one of the multitude of synonyms for essentially the same concept.

Socialists promise free stuff.

Socialists have no qualms about promising other people’s money and property in order to buy votes and loyalty. In their quest to attain power over the people they will reverse reality, such that it is ‘greedy’ to keep one’s hard earned money but virtuous to steal it from someone else.
They will couch these promises in flowery terms of income equality or ‘Socialist Justice’ to provide a thin veneer of morality to outright theft at the point of a gun. Oftentimes these assurances will have the underlying implications of free stuff, but worded so that it is a somehow a noble gesture to receive stolen goods.

Socialists gain control based on these promisesThis is either done through evolutionary means, the incremental take-over of government by socialists* who quite often deny they are Socialists*. This is the “One man [or woman], One Vote, ONCE process. Whereby the Socialists* promise loot in exchange for loyalty and votes, attain power and never yield it until their system fails yet again.

Socialists resort to lies and force when these promises cannot be fulfilled.The blunt fact is that the basic precepts of Socialism** are contrary to the psychological principle of Operant Conditioning:Behavior which is reinforced tends to be repeated (i.e. strengthened); behavior which is not reinforced tends to die out-or be extinguished (i.e. weakened).
Thus when people are punished for being productive [From each according to their abilities] and rewarded for sloth [To each according to their abilities] the system breaks down.

When it fails, Socialists declare "it wasn’t really Socialism" and start over.Since they cannot abandon their centuries old ideology, they have to recast it as something else with a new label. Such explains the plethora of labels for essentially the same concept. With socialism** a known failure, they just called it communism,* when that failed to work as advertised, they called it Democratic socialism** over and over again.